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because he then finds ways to trick the various systems of this world into
doing the unexpected as well. Even the machine, a symbol of utmost
reliability, can be made to do something unintended. Yet, the machine does
not just arbitrarily decide to rebel. The machine yields to the calls of
the hacker because the hacker is firstly the one who sees something
overlooked in the machine. There is hope in that moment.
There is potential. The machine is first seen for what it could be,
then it becomes...something new.
Just as the machine receives a call for disobedience, so does the hacker: a
call to the wild, a call to adventure. One mirrors the other. The hacker
yields to that call because it also resonates on a deeper level than the
standard protocols telling him how to operate. The seeming impulsivity of
the trickster may just be giving over to that call, contrary to all the
voices telling him otherwise. Much like the machine, obedience to that call
transforms the person in the process, enabling him to do something he was
not meant to do by getting the machine to do something it was not meant
to do. Both are corrupted, but both are transformed. The hacker
is simultaneously a corruptor and a liberator because he lingers in the
liminality between worlds, capable of falling into several different fates.
As a trickster, Hermes' fate also dangled between being thrown into the
abyss or being accepted into the pantheon, and the seemingly arbitrary
factor that made the difference was that Zeus was amused by Hermes' antics.
I have known both the shame of being thrown into Tartarus and the elation
of being raised to Olympus. I have experienced two entirely different fates
in response to expressing myself through two hacks with the difference being
that I found one who was amused with my antics, lifting me out of my shame
and elevating me to be something more. Sometimes, we are honored.
Sometimes, we are not. True validation is from the phenomena we produce
when the system recognizes us through obedience to our instructions.
Regardless of the often arbitrary response of society, you can be confident
that even in small acts of defiance, you are reenacting the mythology of
the trickster that makes this world. You are a hacker.
"Here you will live a life of danger. Creativity.
Perhaps not a respected life, but certainly an
interesting one."
- Joseph Campbell
--> 06: Acknowledgements
I want to thank Brian Takle, who first introduced me to the concept of the
hacker as a trickster through his essays on The Matrix series. Many of his
ideas have been floating in the back of my mind for the past 20 years,
helping me to link the phenomenological to the mythological.
|=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=|
|=--------------=[ 4 - A Hacker's Introduction to CHERI ]=---------------=|
|=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=|
|=--------------------------=[ xcellerator ]=----------------------------=|
|=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=|
## Introduction
For many years, there have been attempts to address the issue of "weird
machines" in the context of exploitation at "the source". People have
always disagreed on what "the source" of the problem is, and therefore have
approached the issue from various angles. For this reason, we have ended up
with a great many solutions that all work in different ways and with
different levels of efficacy. One of the newer and more unusual approaches
has been coming out of Cambridge University in the UK for a few years now,
and is named CHERI. The acronym itself stands for "Capability Hardware
Enhanced RISC Instructions", which doesn't do a whole lot to explain *what*
CHERI actually is or how it could affect binary exploitation.
The goal of this article is to introduce CHERI from a hacker's perspective
by trying to understand why it exists in the first place, and how
it can (or perhaps will?) affect binary exploitation in the future. Coming
from academia, the CHERI project naturally uses a lot of academic language
that is sometimes tricky to parse or equate to things that the modern
day hacker is more familiar with. Hopefully by the end of this article,
you'll be able to do your own research on CHERI and even experiment with
compiling and executing CHERI code, all the while relating what you're
reading to existing concepts that you're likely already comfortable with.
A good thing to address from the outset is "why should you care?". We're
certainly used to thinking about computers at very low levels as exploit
developers, and even digging into clever hardware features like MTE or CET.
However, the central feature that this article is going to spend its time
on, the "capability", isn't even available in any commercial hardware yet,
and certainly isn't likely to pop up in your average xdev's path on their
way to root in the immediate future. And yet, I'm telling you that you
*should* care about capability computing, and not just because its cool.
Even if tomorrow we all decided that the only code anyone would write has
to be memory-safe, it still wouldn't address the hundreds of billions of
lines of code out there that isn't (and that's probably a low-ball
estimate). If anything is going to save us, the solution is going to have
to work *with* all that code and not just require rewriting it all. CHERI
is the closest thing I've seen to addressing this problem. If all of that
doesn't convince you to read on, then maybe consider the challenge of
trying to overcome yet another clever mitigation.
To begin with, let's think about the problem that CHERI is trying to solve.
"Exploitation" is too broad a term, and academics like to be specific with